Celite for minipreps

We tried out the 'Merlin' minipreps posted here late last year.
Basically, this was a homemade recipe for alkaline lysis followed
by binding to a column of diatomaceous earth in guanidinium HCl -
in fact, not unlike Wizard minipreps come to think of it. We found
that this homemade recipe gave rather poor yield, and traced the problem to
the matrix. We changed the source of Celite from the recommended
Fluka Celite 545 to Celite Analytical Filter Aid (bought from
Koch-Light about 20 years ago, judging from the state of the carton).
This finer grade of Celite produced a much (3-4x) better yield than the
Celite 545, and the DNA cuts and sequences (Pharmacia T7 kit) just fine.
The only other problem is that the Guanidinium HCl precipitates out in cold
weather (it was 10C in the lab yesterday), so you need to heat to 30 before
use.
Andy